By Michael Regenstreif
This issue of the Bulletin went to press just before Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) was held on the campuses of many North American universities, including Carleton University and the University of Ottawa. Events like IAW give rise to the question of when and how criticisms of actions taken by the Israeli state cross the line into antisemitism.
Policies and actions of the Israeli government – like those of any government – are fair game for criticism. Criticizing an Israeli government policy or action is not inherently antisemitic.
However, it has become painfully obvious that some of the anti-Israel activity we see is antisemitic. MP Irwin Cotler, a former justice minister and long-time human rights activist, points to a new kind of antisemitism masquerading as anti-Zionism. Whereas traditional antisemitism was directed at the rights of Jews to live as equal members in whatever society Jews were present, the new antisemitism is directed against Israel as “the collective Jew among the nations.”
In his keynote address to the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism conference in London last month, Cotler described three types of this new antisemitism.
The first is genocidal and is manifested by governments like Iran’s threatening to wipe Israel off the map, terrorist movements like Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Al-Qaeda whose covenants “call for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews wherever they may be,” and even religious fatwas “where Jews and Judaism are characterized as the perfidious enemy of Islam.”
The second is ideological and is manifested by demonizing Israel as a racist, apartheid or Nazi state. This ideological antisemitism masquerading as anti-Zionism seeks to delegitimize Israel as a state. Here at home, this kind of antisemitism seeks to tarnish pro-Israel activists with guilt-by-association. This is the kind of thinly veiled antisemitism Jewish students are often faced with on campus.
Legalized antisemitism is the third type. “Here,” said Cotler, “antisemitism simultaneously seeks to mask itself under the banner of human rights, to invoke the authority of international law and to operate under the protective cover of the UN.” The 2001 UN antiracism conference in Durban, South Africa that turned into an antisemitic hate-fest was a manifestation of that antisemitism.
The follow-up to the Durban conference is scheduled to be held next month in Geneva. Canada was the first democracy to conclude that the so-called Durban II conference would likely be another antisemitic hate-fest and pulled out. Israel soon followed. The Obama administration has reached the same conclusion and cancelled U.S. participation. Don’t be surprised if some of the major European democracies also pull out in the coming weeks.
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On Page 13, we have a news report about the Israel boycott resolution passed by the Ontario University Workers’ Coordinating Committee of CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees) Ontario. The resolution, spearheaded by CUPE Ontario president Sid Ryan, a long-time anti-Israel activist, will be presented to the CUPE Ontario convention in May.
This resolution, aimed at cutting ties between universities in Ontario and Israel, is watered down from what Ryan was pushing in January when he said, “Israeli academics should not be on our campuses unless they explicitly condemn the university bombing and the assault on Gaza in general.” That demand, so similar to the McCarthyism that destroyed the careers and lives of so many on the left in the 1950s, was too extreme even for the CUPE Ontario committee, which passed the diluted version.
The resolution does not – at least not yet – speak for CUPE Ontario. It remains to be seen whether Ryan will be able to convince the broader membership to support the boycott. It certainly does not speak for CUPE National.
A couple of days after the committee passed its resolution, a statement was released by Paul Moist, CUPE’s national president. “CUPE National would like to state that it does not support the resolution passed by the Ontario University Workers Coordinating Committee of CUPE Ontario on February 22, 2009. The views expressed in the resolution are those of a small number of CUPE Ontario members. The resolution does not represent CUPE National policy.”
Should the resolution pass at CUPE Ontario’s May convention – and there’s no guarantee that it will – it will not be binding on any university. Despite the loud and sometimes intimidating voices of a few professors and students, our universities do understand that peace, progress and a better world will come through openness and collaboration, not boycotts and closed doors.
Israeli universities do cutting-edge research in many areas, including medicine, technology and the environment, and we are likely to see more collaboration between Canadian and Israeli universities in the years to come. To paraphrase from Hillel Ottawa’s week of campus activities last month, expect more references to ‘Israel, a partner’ in the future.
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